In the past decade, the use of the Internet in connection with commercial activities (so-called “e-commerce”) has exploded into virtually all areas of the business world. Among the businesses utilizing the Internet for e-commerce purposes have been car rental businesses.
One of the ways that the car rental industry has utilized the power of the Internet is through on-line reservation booking. In addition to the many travel web sites, another way for a consumer to book a reservation over the Internet using an Internet-connected computer is to interact with a server maintained by the entity that books the reservation. To successfully complete a reservation transaction, the customer must generally provide the server with 3 or 4 basic types of information: (1) temporal information—when and for how long the car rental is needed (typically entered as pick up and return dates), (2) location information—from which branch of the rental car company the rental car is desired to be obtained, (3) vehicle information—what type of vehicle is needed, and optionally (4) customer information—the customer's age and/or name.
With these informational needs in mind, various websites dedicated to on-line booking of car rental reservations have been developed. Such on-line reservation websites guide the customer through the reservation process so that the customer provides the server with the information necessary to complete a reservation transaction. Thereafter, the server can create the reservation and post it to the rental car company's database. However, the current on-line reservation websites are not particularly adept at guiding customers through the reservation process in a manner that provides both a high degree of user-friendliness and flexibility. Because of the rigid navigational structure of current on-line reservation websites, it is believed that on-line reservation processing has not taken full advantage of the flexibility desired by consumers and which will allow this marketing channel to reach its full potential.
FIGS. 1(a)-(d) illustrate an example of a conventional on-line reservation booking process. The customer accesses a page having a form that includes a plurality of fields in which he/she can enter data. Some fields are required for the reservation to be booked, some are not (required fields are denoted by the *). If the customer submits data for less than all of the required fields, the form is returned to the customer with an indication that he/she must fill out all required fields to successfully submit a reservation. In the example of FIG. 1(a), it can be seen that the customer has entered “St. Louis Airport” in the required location field, but has left all other fields blank. When this form is submitted, the form of FIG. 1(b) would typically be returned. Error indicators would typically be placed adjacent to the blank required fields, and an error message instructs the customer to fill all required fields. If the form of FIG. 1(c) represents the result of the customer's next attempt to submit a reservation, it can seen that the customer has now failed to include his/her age in the form. The confirmation form of FIG. 1(d) will typically only be provided to the customer after an age is entered in the age field. The confirmation page of FIG. 1(d) is typically only presented to the customer after the customer has submitted all required fields and the server has determined that a reservation is possible given the data submitted in the required fields (i.e., that a luxury sedan is available for rental at the St. Louis Airport branch from Aug. 1, 2002 through Aug. 3, 2002 to a 35-year old person).
Because of the different types of data needed to book a reservation (as exemplified by the required fields in the forms of FIGS. 1(a)-(c)), the on-line rental vehicle reservation process can be thought of as a multi-stage process, wherein each stage corresponds to receipt of a particular type of necessary reservation information from the customer. That is, one stage relates to obtaining temporal information from the customer, another stage relates to obtaining location information from the customer, another stage relates to obtaining vehicle information from the customer, and yet another stage relates to obtaining personal information from the customer.
Many current on-line rental vehicle reservation websites guide customers through these stages one stage at a time. That is to say, the customer is first presented with a page requesting that temporal information for the reservation be provided. After the customer transmits the requested temporal data to the server, the server responds by presenting the customer with a page requesting that location information for the reservation be provided. After the customer transmits the requested location data to the server, the server responds by presenting the customer with a page requesting that vehicle information be provided, and so on until the server receives all types of necessary data. Once all types of necessary data are received, the server typically presents the customer with a verify page that summarizes the entered data. If the customer wishes to change any of the entries, that customer is typically dropped back to the stage where revision is desired. In simplistic systems, the customer must typically thereafter re-supply the server with the information for any stages downstream from the revised stage. In more advanced systems, the customer typically can be returned to the verify page after entering the revision data. FIG. 2 illustrates such a conventional linear process (the dashed line indicating the improved revision process).
Such conventional techniques suffer from a shortcoming in that a customer who realizes that an error was made in entering stage 1 data (for example, entering the wrong starting date for the rental) but does not realize the mistake until stage 2, must typically process through all the other stages before getting the opportunity to correct the mistake. Because of this inconvenience, customer frustration may occur which could lead to the customer leaving the site without completing the reservation. Also, such conventional reservation techniques typically require the customer to complete reservation stages in a fixed order defined by the reservation booking entity and not the customer. Thus, customers typically do not have the freedom to complete stages in the order they may desire.
Another reservation booking process known in the art as of the filing date hereof is shown in FIG. 3. Rather than forcing the customer to first complete a particular stage before proceeding to a next stage, the customer is allowed to first complete any of a plurality of stages (but not the vehicle stage—which requires prior completion of both the time stage and location stage), and then proceed through each individual remaining stage in a single-step fashion. While such a reservation system gives the customer the partial freedom to select the order in which stages are completed, it still requires the customer to complete the reservation process sequentially using a fixed number of minimum data exchanges. That is to say, for each stage, the customer must access the page associated with that stage before proceeding to a page associated with the next stage. This shortcoming unnecessarily draws out the reservation process, thereby adding to customer frustration and possible loss of a reservation.
Another feature of a known on-line reservation system is a summary section that is provided on the left hand side of each page associated with a stage (the right hand side of each page is dedicated to prompting the customer to enter the data for the stage associated therewith). The summary section lists the stage data entered by the customer. As the customer completes stages, the summary section is updated with the new data entries. However, the competitor's summary section is a read-only summary. It is not interactive to allow the customer to directly select a data entry he or she may wish to revise. If the customer, upon reviewing the summary section, decides that a stage needs to be re-visited to revise the data corresponding thereto, the customer must correlate which stage is associated with the data needing revision and then identify a tab or other pointer on the right hand side of the page and select it to re-visit the stage associated with the data needing revision. FIG. 4 illustrates this aspect of the known reservation system. The potential customer confusion that may be created as customers navigate through such an on-line reservation system is thought to increase customer dissatisfaction with the web site.
Log file research and usability tests have shown that customers will abandon websites as a function of the website's user-unfriendliness and inconvenience. As such, to maximize the potential of their e-commerce investment, it is highly important that reservation booking entities provide an on-line reservation system that not only smoothly guides the customer from start to finish but also allows the customer some flexibility in navigating the site at their own desired pace with a minimum of inconvenience. This is especially the case due to the inherent uncertainty of speed and connectivity of the Internet. In other words, requiring potential customers to access increased numbers of menus or displays increases the amount of time required to successfully complete a reservation. These studies have shown that user drop out increases as a function of time, so designing a web site which perhaps is easily implementable in HTML or other programming code may well lead to a rigid, single path architecture that is not optimized for user friendliness, minimal data entry, and minimal display access steps.